MANILA, Philippines — A majority of Senate employees have been inoculated against COVID-19, Senate President Vicente Sotto III said Tuesday.
"As of today, the Senate has all the employees vaccinated at 73%. In other words, 73% of the Senate is already vaccinated," Sotto announced during a plenary session.
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The remaining 27% who are unvaccinated, he added, includes some senators. "[B]ecause ang usapan natin, huli tayo (our agreement was we would go last)."
Commission on Appointments and Senate Electoral Tribunal employees are scheduled to be vaccinated this Saturday, he added. Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Juan Miguel said security guards and janitorial staff were also included in the chamber's inoculation campaign.
They did not mention the brands of the vaccines used and whether these were taken from the government's stockpile.
However, in March, Sotto said the upper chamber was trying to procure 5,000 coronavirus vaccines for its staff whom he said are frontline personnel in essential services but have no priority allocations under the government's vaccination program.
"It's not the Senate that will go first [but] our employees. Of course, frontline workers in the Senate will go first," he told state-run PTV in Filipino at the time.
He also said Senate leadership preferred vaccines from Russia's Gamaleya Research Institute and China's Sinopharm. Of these two, only Russia's Sputnik V has emergency use approval from local regulators.
Vaccine czar Carlito Galvez Jr. in a prerecorded pandemic task force meeting aired Tuesday said the government has administered a total of 3,001,875 jabs as of May 16, utilizing less than half of the 7.77 million doses it has received in total.
Since the government kicked off its inoculation campaign earlier this year, Galvez said 719,602 people have been fully vaccinated and over 2.28 million have received their first dose.
— Bella Perez-Rubio